Past Event: Little Richard or Minister Richard W. Penniman? Black Religion, Sexuality, and Rock 'n' Soul: ISM Fellows Lunch Talk with Ahmad Greene-Hayes

Exploring the religious life of Richard Wayne Penniman (or Little Richard), the paradigmatic, loud, raucous, flamboyant rock 'n' roll preacher-musician, is a significant undertaking for a multitude of reasons. For one, Little Richard's musical style and gendered performances played a pivotal role in shaping the cultural landscape of the 1950s and beyond, as he invented his own sound while paying homage to the Black church women who raised him in Macon, Georgia, such that he was ultimately able to inspire the likes of Elvis Presley and other white mainstream artists. Delving into his religious experiences provides valuable insights into how Black religion sits at the crux of the music and cultural dynamics of the era, such that the history of Southern gospel music functions as a foray into larger discourses about the sacred and the secular which shaped Richard’s worldview. More to this point, Little Richard's unending transformations are another compelling component of his life as he often oscillated between conservative and progressive political, social, and theological values. For instance, his decision to leave his thriving music career in the late 1950s to become a preacher and attend seminary, only to return to secular music later, raises intriguing questions about the interplay between Black religious conservativism, celebrity, and sexual identity. More importantly, Richard’s life functions as a stained-glass window into the complex negotiations that Black queer subjects make in order to manage the demands of Black religious life and culture in the wake of slavery, the Black social reform movement, and Black Protestant churches’ demand for respectability in the service of the Black (heterosexual) family. This talk revisits Richard’s life over the course of the long twentieth century to show how his life disrupts these assumptive logics and offers us insights into Black queer religious self-fashioning.

This event is free, but registration is required. Lunch will be provided.

Open to Yale Community only.

Contact: Katya Vetrov

Ahmad Greene-Hayes, Ph.D., is assistant professor of African American Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School and a member of the Standing Committee for the Study of Religion and the Standing Committee on Advanced Degrees in American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. A social historian and critical theorist, Greene-Hayes is an accomplished scholar and teacher, and his research interests include critical Black Studies, Black Atlantic Religions in the Americas, and race, queerness, and sexuality in the context of African American and Caribbean religious histories. He is the author of Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion-Making in Jim Crow New Orleans, which is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press in the Class 200: New Studies in Religion series in early 2025, and he has published essays in the Journal of Africana Religions, Nova Religio, GLQ, and the Journal of African American History, among others. Greene-Hayes has held prestigious fellowships from Yale’s LGBT Studies program, the American Society of Church History, and Princeton’s “The Crossroads Project: Black Religious Histories, Communities, and Cultures,” to name a few. In 2022, he was inducted into the Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College, and in 2023, he was inducted into the historic Society for the Study of Black Religion. Dr. Greene-Hayes is a steering committee member for both the Afro-American Religious History Unit and the Religion and Sexuality Unit at the American Academy of Religion, and he served as an advisory board member for the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network from 2019-2024. In conversation with his research, he has consulted and collaborated with the Center on African American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice at Columbia University, the African American Policy Forum, Black Women’s Blueprint, and a host of other nonprofit organizations, churches, and other community institutions. While at ISM, he will be working on his current book project exploring the life of Little Richard through the lens of Black religion and sexuality.